


A Discovery of Warming

by fluffernutter8



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s01e05 The Iron Ceiling, F/M, Gen, Steggy Positivity Week 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 21:14:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11021727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: In Russia, Peggy encounters far more than expected. AU from The Iron Ceiling.





	A Discovery of Warming

“You are not Leviathan.”

Two men in loose uniforms behind bars brought back worse memories than Peggy would like to admit, but she steeled herself. “We’re the good guys.” She smiled, but it disappeared quickly, business coming through. “Why is Leviathan holding you prisoner?”

The bald one leaned through the bars, clearly comfortable talking to them. “They acquired something, a weapon they don’t know how to fix. They want us to fix it for them.”

“So you're engineers?”

“He is the engineer.” He glanced toward the man still hiding in the corner. “I serve as Nikola's _terapevt_ – psychiatrist.”

“So the Reds locked up a head doctor and a mad scientist to get them more firepower?” Thompson sounded his typical mix of cynical and vaguely disgusted. “Sure, why not?”

The tone apparently did not appeal to the psychiatrist. “He is not mad!” he declared. “He is burdened. Look, he sees things in dimensions that we can only imagine. You look at a field of grass, you see pretty picture. He sees biology, phytochemistry. Keeping his gifts from overwhelming him, this requires discipline, stability. Since Leviathan took his family, stability does not come easy. I provide the discipline he needs.”

Perhaps the inner workings of a genius would have been useful or interesting at another time, but they had information to gather and a time-frame to keep to. Peggy picked up the questioning.

“This weapon Leviathan wants you to fix, what is it?”

Nikola stepped forward for the first time, his tone low and reverent. “Oh, it's beautiful. He is frozen now, but it is amazing what Howard Stark was able to do to him.”

“Stark.” Thompson commented, jerking his chin a bit. “Is he here?” but Peggy spoke over him.

“What do you mean, he?” Though accented, the men’s English had been excellent; changing to personal pronouns for an inanimate object didn’t seem to fit.

“The man!” Nikola waved an aggravated hand as if irritated that she was not keeping up. “He used to be in the newsreels. Your Captain America.”

From very far away, she heard Thompson change the question, even sharper. “Captain America? Is he here?”

“Yes,” the doctor said this time. “Leviathan found him below the ocean, in the ice. They brought him here so Nikola could discover a way to remove him from the ice without damaging him.”

Peggy swallowed very hard, took a gathering breath. Her voice still wavered. “I assume Leviathan wants to use him to recreate the original serum?”

The doctor shook his head. “No, no. Perhaps this was the original plan, but Nikola was able to find a heartbeat beneath the ice. Now he is meant to help recover him intact.” He shrugged. “Perhaps Mr. Stark would have more information, but even without him we would like the operation to be a success. We have been attempting caution.”

“Where is he?” Peggy said. The words felt slippery and unreal in her mouth, and came out in a polite, breathless way. She found her fingers convulsing around her rifle.

Nikola gestured. “They keep him down the hall.”

She ran, even as Thompson yelled after her, even as one of the boys called, “Incoming!” and gunshots rang out down the hall. She opened one door, found a supply closet. The next was some kind of laboratory. She didn’t need to open the third. The embedded window made it easy to see inside. Even with the frost, she could see him, upright, sarcophagus-like, the bright red and blue of his uniform showing through the case of ice.

She shot at the lock, but it held. She wanted to see his face. She shot at the window, but the bullet did nothing. She switched to bashing at the window with the butt of her rifle, over and over until icy air began to seep through intricate cracks, and just then Dugan grabbed her arm.

“Time to go,” he shouted in that practical, cinematic tone of his, and for a moment she just stared.

When she spoke, her voice was the soft, hopeless command of plans for meeting at the Stork Club. “Don’t make me leave him.”

“Smart enough to know I can’t make you do anything,” Dugan said. “But things are getting a little hot in here for you to stick around.” She looked past him, down the corridor, to the gun battle still in progress. “We got that bald prisoner, and Thompson. I think it’s time for the rest of us.”

She closed her eyes because the knowledge was too heavy. They would move him before she had a chance to tell anyone or convince them to return with reinforcements. She pressed a palm to the door. Even the outward metal was brutally cold, and she hated that thought, Steve stuck with these people, still alone, still freezing. She turned to Dugan. “Come on.”

Collapsed on the floor of the truck, she stared up at the ceiling. Everyone looked away from her. Perhaps they were unsure how to handle the tears that had appeared without her knowledge or consent. Perhaps they could not withstand the truth in each other’s eyes: Captain America had been found in enemy hands, and they had left him behind.

She had left Steve Rogers behind.

* * *

Peggy compartmentalized, but every move over the next, quick days felt like an obstacle batted aside, something to get through before she could return to business.

The day after Chief Dooley’s funeral, in all the confusion of power transfer, Peggy requested an indefinite leave of absence. She told Angie that she was going to visit family back home. Howard was waiting at the airstrip. She hadn’t called, but she had made no other arrangements.

A familiar signal whistle sounded as she stepped out of the plane. Jim Morita looked the same. All of the Commandos did. But even the familiarity didn’t make things easier, and even the presence of Pinky and Happy Sam couldn’t hide those missing, like gaps in a smile.

Falsworth unscrewed a flask, poured for everyone. “To the captain,” he said, and somehow Peggy felt bolstered by it, pledge and tribute, battle cry and compass.

* * *

The betrayal of it was that in a certain way, this felt more urgent than the war. Perhaps because this was not a world banded together but only them, circumventing law and bureaucracy and borders. Perhaps because she’d thought it had ended and there were new challenges to be met, only to find that the war had fossilized instead.

Perhaps because it was Steve; it hit to the heart of her.

Leviathan was not the prized child that Hydra had been in the beginning. It was scrappier, without the elaborate cliffside fortresses. Through aerial surveillance, the bases looked like typical factories or business complexes. True potential locations were hard to uncover; territory was enormous. Even when they uncovered and raided facilities, they would most often find them empty or staffed with a few scientists or a handful of monstrous girls.

The boys got better at shooting at pigtails without hesitating. Peggy still had to look away from the wrench in their faces.

She began to wonder if this was all part of a plan: wear them down, make them break or leave or kill each other.

They trekked on.

* * *

Howard, still managing his guilt, got them their first lead: a Soviet scientist, Volkov, who he’d remembered corresponding with about the regenerative properties of cells.

(“Well, his work was actually about freeze-drying meat, but the principles applied. If they know about him, they’ll want to talk to him.”)

They found Volkov’s home empty but pristine. Either he was a tidy person who had left of his own accord, or his home had been left in perfect order after being searched.

Peggy, the most natural at Russian, stepped out to start questioning neighbors. When she returned, everyone was staring at Dugan. Glass had shattered around his feet and he was holding a bundle of papers.

“It was an accident,” he told Peggy. “I thought maybe there might be something hidden behind the picture frame, but I dropped it. Guess it was inside instead.”

Falsworth thumped him on the shoulder. “I’m glad to have the luckiest oaf in the world along.”

Once Peggy and Howard had broken the code and translated the papers, they found that it was quite a large amount of research in freezing and regenerating cells. Volkov seemed to think he’d found a breakthrough with a compound called Carbonium Z, which allowed the cell walls to freeze and defrost repeatedly without bursting.

“He’s on the wrong track,” Howard declared. “If regeneration was possible using something like that, I’d already be a millionaire a few times over. Well, a few more times.”

Peggy rolled out a map. “Putting your ego aside, if we were to search out this chemical, where would it be produced?”

Howard narrated as he inserted pushpins. “The French are actually doing a good bit of chemical work, but they’re not exactly on friendly terms with the Russians. I’ve been hearing about some work in South America, but the location isn’t exactly ideal. I think our best bets would be around here or here –” He stabbed a pin somewhere in the Urals, and then added another somewhere in the middle of Siberia.

“Good luck that I’ve packed my parka, then,” Peggy said grimly.

* * *

They wasted a week watching a plant near Irkutsk before they decided that nothing out of the ordinary was being done there.

One day into their surveillance outside Osa, and they knew that something was afoot.

Jones and Pinky reported men on smoke breaks complaining about a complex job they’d been ordered to complete rapidly. Dernier examined the soil, the refuse, the air, and declared that they were surely manufacturing new materials here. They followed the courier the next morning.

“That one’s not empty,” Morita said so quietly that the fog of his breath was the only sign. His seriousness chilled Peggy more than the cold.

They were immersed in a firefight as soon as Dugan and Dernier blew in the doors from either end. They weren’t aiming for discretion this time. Peggy had planned this and she wanted it over.

Howard’s armor held, unsurprisingly, better than SSR standard issue. Falsworth shook off a bullet that would have caught him in the belly. Sam was winded but unharmed when he took a moment too long to incapacitate one of the uncanny girls. Dugan got her a moment later, the blast wide and messy but successful. Somehow Peggy found herself surprised; she had been expecting, for some reason, one of Barnes’s neat, timely shots.

It took perhaps a half an hour, and then Peggy was breathing into the loud sort of quiet that followed a battle.

“Spread out in pairs,” she told everyone. “Keep alert for anyone hiding. Use your radios if you find any sign of him.”

She walked with Monty, who she’d always liked partnering with; they had the same sort of training, so it came naturally. They saw the room at the same time. It sat against the edge of the facility, taking advantage of the outdoor cold. Peggy bit down hard against the thought of all the winters Steve had spent avoiding this type of freeze.

“Stand back,” she told Falsworth as she lined the edges of the doorway with the explosives Dernier had given them. She blew the door herself and stepped in.

The ice was filled with fog. She could still only make out his uniform, and the strange, splayed position he was in.

“Get Howard here with the truck,” she said, and despite her quiet voice, Monty heard and obeyed.

Her own radio crackled at that moment, overly loud in the small space. “Carter, I think there’s something you should see,” Jones said.

She couldn’t think of a thing in the world this could be about. “I’ve already found him,” she said into the radio, distracted.

And Jones replied, “We’ve found something else. Another old friend.”

* * *

“I told you we didn’t need to mess around with Carbonium anything. Serum’s smarter than that,” Howard said, moving around to check one of the devices he’d thrown together to monitor Steve’s vital signs. They had already gone through the layers of heavy ice with heat lamps, then moved to more standard hypothermia procedures. Now he lay still but obviously breathing on the bed, only a slightly lowered temperature revealing exactly how much he had been through.

“I’m sure there are other ways to entertain yourself than continual reminders of your own brilliance,” Peggy remarked. “And as I recall, your contribution to the original process seemed mostly related to shooting blinding laser beams.”

“You should listen to her, Stark. Carter’s always been a smart lady,” Bucky Barnes added hoarsely. He had been frozen much more precisely than Steve’s preserved block of ice. Waking him up had been terrible nevertheless. Nearly two days later and Jarvis kept showing up in the lab to replace his cold tea with hot. Barnes kept a blanket draped around his shoulders, held together with one hand. His entire opposite arm appeared to have been amputated. He couldn’t seem to recall whether or not it had been necessary due to the accident. Howard was already planning for complicated prosthetics. Peggy, though not exactly in the mood to trust psychiatric professionals, knew she would need to find someone for him to talk with, soon.

“Oh, I know it, pal,” Howard said, and Peggy had just a moment to consider smiling at him before he was distracted by something on the monitor. As far as Peggy could tell, one of the numbers had risen. She stepped closer to Steve’s bed, refusing to believe that they could come this far only to have him fall into distress now.

He opened his eyes.

His breathing rasped a bit as he took in the room: Howard first, right above his head, then Peggy, and Bucky on his other side. He mostly ignored Howard, eyes flicking back and forth between the other two. Finally he rested on Peggy.

“Steve,” she said, helpless, smiling, teary. “Welcome back.” Bucky leaned forward, grasped his arm.

Steve’s voice, when he spoke, held echoes of the ice, just a bit shuddering, just a bit shattered. But it also sounded just like his own. “Looks a little different than I thought it would. Didn’t figure they’d have hospital rooms in heaven.”

Bucky groaned. Stark let out a laugh. “Rogers, if you wanted good lines, I’d’ve given ‘em to you.”

Peggy ignored them. Her shoulders shook. “Well,” she said. “If you were looking for something to say to make me forget your unforgivable lateness, I believe you found it.”

* * *

_Six months later_

“Am I doing this right?”

“You’re absolutely fine, my darling.”

“I feel like I’m going too fast.”

“It feels just fast enough to me.”

“Tell me if I do anything wrong, will you?”

“Gladly. But you’ve been doing wonderfully until now.”

Bucky leaned forward toward the front seat. “I’d ease up on the brake a little there, buddy. Carter starts work in a few days, not the next millennium.”

“Thought we agreed no peanut gallery,” Steve grumbled. “Howard’s got all sorts of buttons up here, ya know. One of them’s probably an ejector seat.”

“I would keep the threats conservative,” Peggy reminded him. “You seem to be balancing quite enough with the standard two pedals.”

Steve pinched her, lightly, but kept his eyes on the road. He was being a very conscientious driver for someone navigating an empty country road between Missouri and Oklahoma, especially considering he had once planned to drive a Jeep several hundred miles through enemy territory.

“Lunch break soon?” Steve asked, although Peggy was unsure if it was purely motivated by the desire for a change of subject. He seemed to enjoy food more since he’d been recovered than even since the serum. He’d tried half the menu and every type of pie at the automat before they’d left New York.

“I suppose,” Peggy agreed, languidly. “Find the next spot that looks good.” She’d accepted the reassignment to California partially because she’d preferred working with Daniel than with Thompson, partially because with Dottie captured, she felt that any further retribution against Leviathan could just as easily be taken from the opposite coast; she did not, however, feel particular guilt for taking the scenic route rather than the scheduled plane.

Barnes put his hat over his eyes and leaned back in the seat. “Wake me when we get there.” None of them were sure whether he was along for the ride or planning to stay permanently. Steve had been worrying about him even before they’d all stopped worrying about Steve. Perhaps a change of scenery would be good for him.

For his part, Steve had been calm when she’d come home in the middle of the day and told him about the transfer. “I guess after you’ve spent time as a Russian ice cube, you take a different perspective on things. New York, Los Angeles, they’re not what’s important,” he’d said, giving her one of his shy glances.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she told him. “You were an American ice cube who just happened to be in Russia.” But she’d squeezed his hand.

“Look,” Steve said now, jerking his head at a sign. “World’s largest chicken coop’s coming up.”

“Perhaps we’ll visit after lunch,” Peggy offered. She adjusted the scarf over her hair, and settled against his side. She gazed out at the road ahead.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for day 1 of Steggy Positivity Week. I'm not _overjoyed_ with it, but win some, lose some?


End file.
